Socially|Mundane

I usually try to login for an hour at about 4:30 two or three times a week. You know, to clear-out any notices and especially the Instant Message cache, which caps far sooner than it ever used to.

However, when I made my attempt, I received the old familiar message: "Logins are disabled now..." and I popped over to the Grid Status page to take a peek. I knew there was maintenance scheduled, but it wasn't supposed to start until 5 a.m. and I don't recall they were planning to disable logins.

Sure enough, it was bumped-up an hour and the logins were disabled. So I tended to other real life tasks.

However, something jumped out at me (reversed to display timeline oldest to newest, top-down - emphasis is mine):

[Started] Planned Database Maintenance: Feb 12, 2009: "[UPDATE 9 Feb 08 09 4:50 pm Pacific]
The scope and schedule for this downtime has changed."

[BUMP 11 February 08 09 2:20 Pacific]  Just a reminder that this is still planned for tomorrow (Thursday) morning.  We’ll keep you posted with any unexpected developments or changes to the scheduling or scope.

[12 February 09 04:06 am PST] The scheduled maintenance is under way.

[04:15 am PST] The xStreet marketplace will also be disabled for the duration of this maintenance.

[05:15AM Pacific] Scheduled maintenance is going as planned.

I found this unusual.

SL Exchange; now known as XStreet SL is designed to automatically ping the grid and know when the asset servers are wonky or otherwise offline. This is to prevent people from losing money through purchases that are reported as delivered, but aren't.

So why would Linden Lab feel the need to mention this in their Grid Status updates?

I suspect it's because they are making the first code changes to begin the actual integration of XStreet SL into the Grid directly. It only makes sense. After all, on the Second Life Resident Home Page, there is the big, over-bright, ugly Valentines advertisement urging everyone who sees it to buy something foo-foo for your digital pixel-lover...through XStreet SL.

Practically impossible unless both of you have XStreet SL accounts and you have enough Linden buckaroos (L$) in that XStreet SL account - which is a separate bank.

So, I suspect a large part of this "scheduled maintenance" has a lot to do with the beginning stages of integration of XStreet SL agent UUID database with the main grid, just in-time for Valentine's day.

What will really screw-up people is when, not if, they link your in-world L$ balance with that of your XStreet SL account directly, which may actually be part of this 'maintenance', too by the way. I appreciate that it's a separate bank account right now. It's far too easy to buy things on impulse through that online shop and at OnRez.com. So when my XStreet SL L$ balance gets close to L$0 - I don't sweat it because my in-world balance will be what it was when I last made a purchase in-world. it's easy to set a "hard budget" there.

However, when the day comes that my XStreet SL balance shows L$5 is all that is left in my account and I pop in-world and it says the same thing because it is live-linked the same way the LindeX is, it will be a rather unnerving thing for a month or so. And I can see a lot more scrutiny in my purchasing decisions.

So, with Shop.Onrez.com dying on Monday, leaving only XStreet SL available and this 'scheduled maintenance' that happens to include XStreet SL being 'affected', I would venture to do the math and actually dare to presume that 2+2 will equal 4 this time around.

And the maintenance must have gone smoother than they anticipated. Off the cuff, I decided to try logging in just before I leave for real life work, at 5:30 a.m. I went right in without delay.

...of course, there is talk about (and Linden Lab already has shown and proven the ability exists) allowing premium memberships to be allowed to login while keeping basic accounts out in what we affectionately call "login-throttling".

But that's a post for another time.
via Second Life Grid Status